Kat McAdaragh

I was procrastinating my own deadline when I stumbled across Eva Asprakis’s bio. By the time her first book was published, she’d accumulated four surnames: her mother’s French-Canadian name, the one on her British passport, her Cypriot family name from her stepfather’s adoption, and her married name.

As someone who’s spent years thinking about narrative identity in literature, this immediately caught my attention. Most writers spend their careers exploring who they are—Eva seemed to be collecting evidence of who she’d been told she was.

When Structure Actually Serves Story

Eva’s Thirty-Eight Days of Rain uses a framework that could easily feel contrived: thirty-eight chapters, each set on one of Cyprus’s annual rainy days, following protagonist Androulla through a year of upheaval. In writing workshops I’ve attended, this would be the kind of high-concept structure that makes everyone nervous.

But it works, and here’s why: Eva understands that form should amplify content, not distract from it. The rain isn’t metaphor for the sake of metaphor—it’s the actual weather pattern of a place that becomes crucial to understanding how someone experiences time and change. Cyprus gets exactly thirty-eight rainy days a year. Eva took this geographic reality and used it to structure a story about how transformation accumulates gradually, storm by storm.

The technical execution is solid. Each chapter feels complete while building toward something larger. The pacing never drags, which is remarkable for a book that could have easily become episodic.

The Immigration Narrative We Haven’t Read

Androulla is twenty-four, recently married, dealing with infertility while navigating Cyprus’s citizenship process. On the surface, it hits familiar notes—young woman confronting expectations about motherhood, marriage under pressure, bureaucratic frustration. But Eva avoids the traps of both the “universal woman’s experience” and the “immigration struggle” genres.

Instead, she writes something more specific and therefore more interesting: what happens when your emotional sense of home doesn’t align with legal definitions of belonging. Androulla’s considering adoption—both having a child and processing her own experience of being adopted by her stepfather. Eva lets this parallel exist without over-explaining it, trusting readers to understand the complexity.

The prose is clean, direct, unsentimental. No unnecessary flourishes, but the language does exactly what it needs to do. In creative writing communities, we talk about “earned emotion”—Eva’s writing demonstrates what that looks like in practices.

The Writer Behind the Work

Eva was raised in South London by her American mother and Cypriot stepfather and now lives in Nicosia. She’s a contemporary fiction author whose work consistently examines family dynamics, cultural identity, and sexuality. Her credentials include being editor-in-chief of Hyphen magazine and having work in major publications.

What’s notable about her approach is how she handles autobiography in fiction. Yes, the material connects to her own experience—she’s talked about how parts of Thirty-Eight Days of Rain were difficult to write because of personal parallels. But she’s transformed lived experiences into crafted narrative rather than simply transcribing it.

This is harder than it sounds. Most writers struggle with the distance needed to turn personal material into effective fiction. Eva seems to have figured out how to maintain enough objectivity to serve the story while keeping enough emotional truth to make it matter.

Why This Book Works

Thirty-Eight Days of Rain won the 2024 Ink Book Prize for Fiction and received recognition as a NetGalley Book of the Month and IndieReader Approved Book. The awards matter, but what’s more significant is that the book succeeds on its own terms.

Eva has written something that engages with contemporary questions about identity and belonging without becoming a treatise. The political is personal here, but she never loses sight of character development or narrative momentum. Androulla feels like a complete person, not a vehicle for themes.

The book also demonstrates something we discuss a lot in literary circles: how writers from marginalized communities can address their experiences without being limited by them. Eva writes about Cyprus, about immigration, about complex family structures—but she’s not writing “issue fiction.” She’s writing literature that happens to engage with these subjects.

The Craft Perspective

From a technical standpoint, Eva’s work shows strong control of voice, pacing, and structure. The first-person narration feels authentic without becoming self-indulgent. The chapter divisions create natural reading breaks while maintaining momentum. The ending satisfies without tying everything up too neatly.

Her dialogue sounds natural—something many literary writers struggle with. Her descriptions of place feel specific and lived-in rather than researched. She manages exposition well, providing necessary context without info-dumping.

These might sound like basic crafts elements, but executed well, they make the difference between a book that works and one that doesn’t

What’s Next for Eva

Eva has three novels now: Love and Only Water, Thirty-Eight Days of Rain, and Ghost Flight. Each book seems to deepen her exploration of identity, family, and place while developing her technical skills as a writer.

For readers interested in contemporary fiction that engages with questions of belonging and identity, Eva’s work offers both emotional engagement and literary sophistication. For writers, her books demonstrate how to handle personal material with the distance and craft necessary to create effective fiction.

Thirty-Eight Days of Rain in particular shows how structural innovation can serve story rather than overwhelming it. It’s a good example of how contemporary literary fiction can address current issues without sacrificing narrative quality.

Worth reading, especially if you’re interested in how writers are currently approaching questions of home, identity, and the gap between legal and emotional definitions of belonging.